In integrated circuit design verification, electrical circuit simulation is one of the important components utilized by cell characterization, transistor level timing analysis, and other design automation methods and tools. Thus, accurate circuit simulation is a very important step in the design of high performance integrated circuits. A circuit to be simulated is generally described by means of a netlist. A netlist comprises textual data that defines the components used in the circuit and the connections between these components.
In order to reduce the design cycle time, different parts of an original transistor level circuit netlist can being separated and pre-characterized under a variety of input vectors, load conditions, and other factors, to be used later for the entire system analysis. However, as processing technology continues to improve, the size and complexity of electrical circuits continues to increase. This ever increasing size and complexity of integrated circuits requires the use of an inordinate amount of computer time to be spent in circuit simulation. In fact, increasing the number of different input vectors on which a circuit simulation is required to run tends to increase the simulation time exponentially.